People often ask me why I wrote #ChildhoodDisrupted.
As a science journalist specializing in the intersection of neurobiology, immunology and emotion, I’d spent 20 years writing about the immune system and the human brain.
When I came across the CDC’s #ACE Study (Adverse Childhood Experiences Study), it struck me like a lightning bolt. I realized that after 20 years of writing about how we become ill and how we heal, I had been missing a huge piece of what can cause disease.
Chronic unpredictable stress in childhood was changing the way in which the stress-response, and our immune system, functioned for life.
It also resonated for me on a personal level.
When I was 12, my father - a writer, a publisher, a man who taught me how to sail, how to laugh, to love Shakespeare - went into the hospital for routine surgery and never came out. When he died my childhood ended. It was as if someone had taken all the color out of the world.
So it made sense to me that my experience had changed me in every system and cell of my body. My body was set on high stress response when I was 12, and my body marinated in stress chemicals for a long time.
As an adult, I’ve been paralyzed twice, by the autoimmune disease Guillain-Barré Syndrome, I have a pacemaker, bone marrow issues, and other immune system concerns.
When I saw the research that showed that for every additional ACE score a woman had, the likelihood that she would be hospitalized with an autoimmune disease as an adult increased by 20 percent, I decided that I had to devote myself to helping people to better understand this research.
So I set out on a three year journey to read over 2000 #ACE studies and wrote #ChildhoodDisrupted
Conventional wisdom tells us what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. But the science tells us that far more often, the opposite is true. We have to change the way we think about children, adversity, and trauma.
I wrote Childhood Disrupted because I believe that CHILDHOOD SHOULD NOT BE DISRUPTED. We need to help every child grow up #ACE free.
Which means parents w/ ACEs need help in resolving their own trauma so they can be the parents they want to be.
- Childhood Disrupted
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